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Showing posts from April, 2009

JCDL 2009

The Joint Conference on Digital Libraries is in Austin this year. It’s an international conference “focused on digital libraries and associated technical, practical, and social issues”.

Kirtas Speed experiment

I haven’t updated in a while. I’ve been training students, and teaching the students to train other students. The lab that I run doubled the size of it's workforce in a month. We went from 18 people to 36. I had estimated taht, in a perfect world, we would be able to scan 128 books a day. After the last month, I don’t feel that this number is practical. Our lab has been able to reach 57 books finished (from beginning to end) every day with two Kirtas APT 2400 book scanners. There are many reasons why I don’t think we’ll get close to 128 books finished or scanned a day. The biggest reason is that our workforce consists of mostly students, and I have no guarantee that I can keep someone at the machines even 80% of the time. I can’t make transitions between users seamless, so there will always be downtime when one person leaves and another person comes in to replace them. But, 57 books finished a day is a good amount. That’s 1710 books a month.